The article does not say much, except that a long observation of a gamma burst was made. In the conclusion it says: "Mr Price said astronomers were not sure what caused gamma-ray bursts."
From what you say it seems that theory is equivalent to knowledge about the hardware. I wonder whether the theory also says something about how information systems are structure and how security works (the difference between authorisation and authentication should be at least being explained).
The United States of America already have said that they would liberate Americans that would be brought before the International Court of Justice in the Hague in the Netherlands (Holland). I believe they even signed an act to support an invasion in such a case.
I would like to add to this, that way to many API's are designed from an implementers point of view, instead from a users point of view. An easy way to recognize API's designed from an implementers point of view, is that the user will have to write many very similar looking sequences of calls, and that bad things happen when you call the primitives in the wrong order.
Without wanting to start a flame war, but it seems that the 6502 was more of a RISC type of processor (with respect to the instruction set), whereas the Z80 was more SISC like, with all kinds of instructions for special things. I liked the rather orthogonal design of the 6502 instruction set. It was good for making compilers. See also www.cc65.org
This idea of zero-page memory addressing was really smart. This gave you 256 semi-registers. This lead to very compact machine code. I liked the design of the 6502 better than the Z80 another 8-bit processor.
I learned Machine Language programming on the 6502 from "Atomic Theory and Practice" by David Johnson-Davies. The 6502 is a rather neat processor. I even once wrote a compiler for a self made language that would compile to 6502 machine code. For a proof that some rather impressive things can be done with it, have a
look at contiki.
Floating point is a completely different matter though.
The Acorn Atom (based on the 6502) did have a floating point library in ROM. I never tried calling it from ML, but it shows that it can be implemented.
Personally, I also would like the semantic web to become true, but I am affraid it will be still a long time, because developments on the internet are mainly driven by commercial reasons, and a real semantic web would need a governmental (or even better, inter-governmental) support. (Remember that web-services are the hype at the moment, and everybody is pushing their own standards.)
At the moment the groups developping the semantic web only have come up with some XML based ontology languages, which to me seem to be still on the syntactical level. Only initiatives like www.wikipedia.com are coming close to the idea of a semantic web.
It seems that nowadays most people have a great problem distinguishing between the logical and the physical representation/storage of data. (Personally, I think that XML sucks from a logical point of view, because its semantics are rather weak and limited.) What we lack is tools for mapping logical representations to physical representations. I think that the main reason why we do not have such tools is that from a marketing perspective they would be very undesirable. (No serious commercial company likes to adhere to an open standard, as that would make it very easy for a customer to switch.)
IMHO, the problem with all existing programming pradigmas is that they fail to separate specification from implementation. The whole software industry seems to be one big cycle of reinventing the wheel. We all seem to work with low-level programming languages that are good for programming implementations, but what we really need is a frame work for mapping specification to implementations in such a way that you can start with a declarative description of your "application" and then implement it by specifying how the "specification" should be mapped ("implemented") into an execution environment.
In this sense aspect programming is only a small step in the right direction, which is Generative Programming.
Serialization is a little more than being able to write objects from RAM to a stream. You also need to implement the reverse, otherwise it is useless. And that is where the above solution goes wrong. You simply lose all pointers between the objects.
This article made me think about the use of Memory Mapped Files as a means to implement a persistent store in C++. For an example of this, have a look at Suneido.
It seems to me that if you believe in a purely physical cause for our existence (and evolution is in that direction), you should also hold the position that your experience of a consciousness is the result (by-product) of a physical process that is completely out of your control. Although you think you have any control over what you do, in reality you are really watching some process outside of your control (a purely physical process) moving your body and speaking.
Or in other words: you think that you are can do something in this world, but in reality it is simply like watching a movie. E.g., you have totally no control over what you will be thinking in two seconds from now.
Now if there is any reality that does not depend on (or is caused by) the physical world that we theorize about (and this is not saying anything about the nature or existence of a God), then it is possible that our consciousness is a reality, and that we can have some (maybe very little) influence over our brain and what we do in this world.
The main reason for my point was that many people (even scientist with a PhD) will find it easier to sign a statement that does not seem to have any implications on how they view themselves, than one that does have major implications. (Yes, when I say: "I love my kids", that is simply a chemical reaction over which I have no control at all.)
I wonder if all these scientist would also have signed a statement like:
I hereby declare that I am the product of a random process that happened by change. That I am not more than the sum of a very complex physical process. Although I do experience some kind of consciousness, I declare that it is a mere illusion produced by my brain. The logical consequence from this position is also that I do not have a free will, and that as far as I do think that I have a free will, this is a mere illusion. My actions are completely defined by the past. It is purely by change that I signed this statement. It is the result of some random physical process whoes nature is beyond my comprehension. (Actually, the concept of "comprehension" is an illusion as well.)
With adding some redundancy it is possible to have a reliable communication channel. Please realize that this kind of techniques have been used for several scientifical satilites going to the other side of our solar system.
The idea is to find a place where there are not many fibrations and to make the system rigid. Movements parallel to the detector axis are (theoretically) not noticed. The remaining vibrations will simply make the instrument temporarily blind. That is no problem as long as they do not occur continiously. It is possible to distinguis between vibrations and changes in lenght. Using multiple instruments all over the world also helps distinquishing between local vibration events and globally caused changes in length due to gravational waves.
I think it is a sad conclusion that XML is here to stay, as it is not such a good format for which is intended and attempts to fix some of the flaws of XML by additional (and often contradicting) formalisms, have not made things better.
XML basically can only represent a tree data-structure with named nodes and attributes. It does not have facilities to represent sorted and unsorted collections with key fields in a proper manner. It also lacks a mechanism for representing references between elements and it is rather poor with respect to the explicit definition of semantical properties of the data, and is very limited in the expression of additional constraints. I once made an effort to come up with something better myself. Please read
this description for the details.
I have heard that the Netherlands is also going to include biometric information on a newly to be developed passport, because it is required by the US government. I think it is ridiculous that the US government is enforcing policies for foreigners that they never would (could) request from their own citizens.
Slashdot Mirror
The article does not say much, except that a long observation of a gamma burst was made. In the conclusion it says: "Mr Price said astronomers were not sure what caused gamma-ray bursts."
From what you say it seems that theory is equivalent to knowledge about the hardware. I wonder whether the theory also says something about how information systems are structure and how security works (the difference between authorisation and authentication should be at least being explained).
The United States of America already have said that they would liberate Americans that would be brought before the International Court of Justice in the Hague in the Netherlands (Holland). I believe they even signed an act to support an invasion in such a case.
I would like to add to this, that way to many API's are designed from an implementers point of view, instead from a users point of view. An easy way to recognize API's designed from an implementers point of view, is that the user will have to write many very similar looking sequences of calls, and that bad things happen when you call the primitives in the wrong order.
I would like to remark that in a sense the zero page could be considered as a "large number of multipurpose registers".
Without wanting to start a flame war, but it seems that the 6502 was more of a RISC type of processor (with respect to the instruction set), whereas the Z80 was more SISC like, with all kinds of instructions for special things. I liked the rather orthogonal design of the 6502 instruction set. It was good for making compilers. See also www.cc65.org
This idea of zero-page memory addressing was really smart. This gave you 256 semi-registers. This lead to very compact machine code. I liked the design of the 6502 better than the Z80 another 8-bit processor.
I learned Machine Language programming on the 6502 from "Atomic Theory and Practice" by David Johnson-Davies. The 6502 is a rather neat processor. I even once wrote a compiler for a self made language that would compile to 6502 machine code. For a proof that some rather impressive things can be done with it, have a look at contiki.
Floating point is a completely different matter though. The Acorn Atom (based on the 6502) did have a floating point library in ROM. I never tried calling it from ML, but it shows that it can be implemented.
Personally, I also would like the semantic web to become true, but I am affraid it will be still a long time, because developments on the internet are mainly driven by commercial reasons, and a real semantic web would need a governmental (or even better, inter-governmental) support. (Remember that web-services are the hype at the moment, and everybody is pushing their own standards.) At the moment the groups developping the semantic web only have come up with some XML based ontology languages, which to me seem to be still on the syntactical level. Only initiatives like www.wikipedia.com are coming close to the idea of a semantic web.
It seems that nowadays most people have a great problem distinguishing between the logical and the physical representation/storage of data. (Personally, I think that XML sucks from a logical point of view, because its semantics are rather weak and limited.) What we lack is tools for mapping logical representations to physical representations. I think that the main reason why we do not have such tools is that from a marketing perspective they would be very undesirable. (No serious commercial company likes to adhere to an open standard, as that would make it very easy for a customer to switch.)
In this sense aspect programming is only a small step in the right direction, which is Generative Programming.
Serialization is a little more than being able to write objects from RAM to a stream. You also need to implement the reverse, otherwise it is useless. And that is where the above solution goes wrong. You simply lose all pointers between the objects.
This article made me think about the use of Memory Mapped Files as a means to implement a persistent store in C++. For an example of this, have a look at Suneido.
It seems to me that if you believe in a purely physical cause for our existence (and evolution is in that direction), you should also hold the position that your experience of a consciousness is the result (by-product) of a physical process that is completely out of your control. Although you think you have any control over what you do, in reality you are really watching some process outside of your control (a purely physical process) moving your body and speaking. Or in other words: you think that you are can do something in this world, but in reality it is simply like watching a movie. E.g., you have totally no control over what you will be thinking in two seconds from now. Now if there is any reality that does not depend on (or is caused by) the physical world that we theorize about (and this is not saying anything about the nature or existence of a God), then it is possible that our consciousness is a reality, and that we can have some (maybe very little) influence over our brain and what we do in this world. The main reason for my point was that many people (even scientist with a PhD) will find it easier to sign a statement that does not seem to have any implications on how they view themselves, than one that does have major implications. (Yes, when I say: "I love my kids", that is simply a chemical reaction over which I have no control at all.)
With adding some redundancy it is possible to have a reliable communication channel. Please realize that this kind of techniques have been used for several scientifical satilites going to the other side of our solar system.
I thought we lived in a three dimensional world? If the axis of the L are horizontal, than vertical movements would not interfere.
The idea is to find a place where there are not many fibrations and to make the system rigid. Movements parallel to the detector axis are (theoretically) not noticed. The remaining vibrations will simply make the instrument temporarily blind. That is no problem as long as they do not occur continiously. It is possible to distinguis between vibrations and changes in lenght. Using multiple instruments all over the world also helps distinquishing between local vibration events and globally caused changes in length due to gravational waves.
I think it is a sad conclusion that XML is here to stay, as it is not such a good format for which is intended and attempts to fix some of the flaws of XML by additional (and often contradicting) formalisms, have not made things better. XML basically can only represent a tree data-structure with named nodes and attributes. It does not have facilities to represent sorted and unsorted collections with key fields in a proper manner. It also lacks a mechanism for representing references between elements and it is rather poor with respect to the explicit definition of semantical properties of the data, and is very limited in the expression of additional constraints. I once made an effort to come up with something better myself. Please read this description for the details.
I have heard that the Netherlands is also going to include biometric information on a newly to be developed passport, because it is required by the US government. I think it is ridiculous that the US government is enforcing policies for foreigners that they never would (could) request from their own citizens.